
Osmin's Rage
Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text
Peter Kivy(Author)
Cornell University Press
Published on 30. March 1999
Book
Paperback/Softback
336 pages
978-0-8014-8589-3 (ISBN)
Description
In his new concluding chapter, Peter Kivy advances his argument on behalf of a distinctive intellectual and musical character of opera before Mozart. He proposes that happy endings were a musical-as opposed to a dramatic-necessity for opera during this period and that Mozart's Idomeneo is properly enjoyed and judged only when listeners are attuned to its seventeenth and eighteenth-century forebears.
Reviews / Votes
Kivy is simply the best philosopher writing about music today.... Here he studies the special problem of opera, how it became both a dramatic and a musical art, and what its underlying aesthetic principles are. He traces opera's philosophical foundations from the imitation theories of Plato and Aristotle, to the representation theory of the Italian Camerata, the mechanistic psychology of Descartes, the doctrine of affektenlehre, and the associationist psychology of the British Enlightenment.... Kivy's writing is honest, insightful, careful, and witty.... There is meat here for philosophers, musicians, music theorists, historians, and social critics.(Choice) Kivy provides close philosophical analysis of texts that underpin the origins of Western European opera and... relates seventeenth and eighteenth-century operatic practice to the philosophical and psychological theories of the times.... In a long and generally excellent discussion Kivy takes as his target those writers... who attempt to deduce a composer's psycho-biography from other librettos he chooses to set.... Kivy's book has a certain acumen and charm.
(Times Literary Supplement)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
907 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8014-8589-3 (9780801485893)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Previous edition
Book
11/1988
Princeton University Press
€43.33
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Person
Peter Kivy is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the author of Music Alone; Authenticities; and Sound and Semblance, all from Cornell.